I am
having some of my old 35 mm slides scanned into the computer!
Oh to be young an carefree once again!Some personal photos of Bob Jensen's days on the U.S.S.
Wisconsin (the last commissioned battleship in the U.S. Navy)(Battleship
days --- Atlantic, Caribbean, Pacific, Cuba, Panama, Chile)
Go to Tray 10 at at
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/PictureHistory/

Home computers are being called upon to perform many
new functions, including the consumption of homework formerly eaten by the
dog.Doug Larsonas quoted by Mark
Shapiro at
http://irascibleprofessor.com/comments-02-05-06.htmThere is a theory which states that if
anyone discovers what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will
instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and
inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already
happened.Douglas Adams

That you compare me to Bin Laden is for him an insult and for me too much
honour, but if you say I am the black-flag bearer of the islam in Europe
fulfills my honour, pride and happiness.Mohammed Bouyeri, the killer of Theo van Gogh(in Holland) ---
http://dutchnewz.net/index.php

They say that generals always fight the last war, and the same seems to be
true of terrorists--and journalists. But the media today do not have the
power they had during the Vietnam era--the power to lose a war. James Taranto, "Bad News Bearers," The Wall Street
Journal, February 1, 2006 ---
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110007888

Prince of Wales Blames Poor Town Planning for
Rise in Obesity.Headline, LeisureOpportunities.co.uk, Jan. 30 as quoted in
Opinion Journal, February 1, 2006

There are two schools of thought on Nostradamus:
either (1) he had supernatural powers which enabled him to prophesy the
future with uncanny accuracy, or (2) he did for bullshit what Stonehenge did
for rocks.Cecil Adams

In the beginning the Universe was created. This
has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.Douglas Adams

As a fan, I'm distraught, but as a cartoonist
looking at new vacant spaces in 2,400 newspapers, well, behind me, my cats
are dancing a conga line. Scott Adams on the ending of Calvin & Hobbes

I believe that the highest promise of technology
is to end war, feed the hungry and make life on earth more fulfilling. While
you're waiting for that, enjoy the second-highest promise of technology --
the ability to buy "Dogbert" merchandise while sitting on your ass.Scott Adams

If you have any trouble sounding condescending,
find a journal referee to show you how it's done.Paraphrased from a quote by Scott Adams who wrote
"Unix user" in place of "journal referee."

Graduates would rather be sued than chase ambulancesJames Calvi, a professor at West Texas A&M
University and chairman of the Prelaw Advisors National Council, said fewer
people may be applying to law school because more are applying to medical
school.
Jonathan E. Glater, "Applications to Law Schools Are Declining, The New
York Times, February 9, 2006 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/09/national/09law.html

Intellectual Diversity or Political Repackaging?The South Dakota House of Representatives on
Wednesday passed a bill that would require public colleges and universities
to file annual reports on the steps they take to assure “intellectual
diversity” on their campuses. Supporters of the bill see it as a new
approach to raising some of the same issues promoted by David Horowitz and
supporters of the “Academic Bill of Rights.” Anne Neal, president of the
American Council of Trustees and Alumni, called Wednesday’s vote “a tipping
point moment” that “offers the promise of a cultural transformation in
American higher education.”
Scott Jaschik, "Intellectual Diversity or Political Repackaging?" Inside
Higher Ed, February 9, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/02/09/dakota

Fiasco at AAUPPeople involved in the AAUP were using words like
“disaster” to describe the fallout they feared from the incident. In the
apology published on the AAUP Web site, the association acknowledged an
“egregious error” in which it had distributed “a deeply offensive article by
a Holocaust denier.” The apology stated that the article had been collected
during research for the conference, but was not intended for distribution to
anyone. All conference participants were notified of “this blunder,” the
statement said, adding that “nothing of this sort will ever happen again.”
Scott Jaschik, "Fiasco at AAUP," Inside Higher Ed, February 9, 2006
---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/02/09/aaup

Professional Correctness: Study in the ethnography of higher
educationCostello’s book is an interesting study in the
ethnography of higher education — and her analysis of the implicit cultural
signals sent by how law and social-work professors dress will raise some
eyebrows, especially around UC-Berkeley. I contacted her by email with a few
questions about her research.
Scott McLemee, "Professional Correctness," Inside Higher Ed, February
8, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/02/08/mclemee

Debut of the all-online GRE delayed until 2007The Educational Testing Service announced Wednesday
that it is pushing back the debut of the new, all-online Graduate Record
Examinations by a year, to the fall of 2007. Officials said that they needed
more time for the transition from a test that mixes paper and computers to
the version that will be entirely electronic. Inside Higher Ed, June 9, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/02/09/qt

Question
Will Europe become a deep freeze with increased global warming?

Answer
It is ironic that one consequence of global warming is that Europe might
plunge into a deep freeze. This possibility stimulated an unusual research
project at the University of Alberta.

Dr. Peter Flynn, the Poole Chair in Management
for Engineers in the U of A Department of Mechanical Engineering, has
studied whether down-welling ocean currents can carry more dissolved
carbon into the deep ocean. He learned they can't, but in the course of
this research he found some evidence that the ocean currents that bring
warm water to the oceans off northern Europe may be weakening.

The results of the research have been published
recently in the journal Climatic Change.

"The current is like an ocean conveyor belt,"
Flynn explained. "It starts in the north Atlantic, where down-welling,
cold, arctic water flows south at the bottom of the ocean, and then
warm, tropical water flows north to fill in the vacuum created by the
cold water, and this warm water helps ensure a mild climate in northern
Europe,"

The melting of fresh water ice due to global
warming can reduce the flow of the down-welling current, and a study
published recently in the journal Nature by researchers at the
University of Southhampton in England reported evidence of weakening
down-welling currents.

Flynn and a graduate student evaluated seven
different methods to enhance down-welling currents. They found one way
was far more cost effective than the others: making thicker sea ice by
pumping salty ocean water on top of ice sheets.

They envisioned more than 8,000 barges moving
into the northern ocean in the fall, speeding the initial formation of
sea ice by pumping a spray of water into the air, and then, once the ice
is formed, pumping ocean water on top of it, trapping the salt in the
ice and reaching a thickness of seven meters.

An Eye Test for Alzheimer'sA Harvard researcher says a laser-based diagnostic
system might be used to detect the disease long before it affects the brain,
allowing for early treatment that could defer its degenerative symptoms.
Sam Jaffe, "An Eye Test for Alzheimer's," Wired News, February 6,
2006 ---
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70151-0.html?tw=wn_index_14

"It's Capitalism Or A Habitable Planet - You Can't Have Both Our
economic system is unsustainable by its very nature. The only response to
climate chaos and peak oil is major social change," by Robert Newman, The
Nation, February 2, 2006 ---
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0202-29.htm

Jensen Comment
It always amazes me how environmentalists confuse an economic system with a
resource preservation system. India and China contributed more to global
warming as socialist/communist states than much of rest of the world
combined, including the U.S. and Europe. Resource abuse is what economists
call a negative externality (or non-convexity in mathematical models) that
is very difficult to control with market prices or communism-derived central
planning board prices. Pollution and waste do not necessarily get controlled
any better under socialism or communism. Perhaps they get controlled worse
since economic prosperity under capitalism leads to alternate solutions to
fossil-fueled energy such as nuclear power. The answer does not lie in
changing the fundamental economic system. The answer lies in imposing
controls either by a democratic process or totalitarian dictates. Don't
confuse environmentalism with fundamental economic systems. All systems may
be environmentally self destructive if the externalities are not vigorously
controlled. With world population growth outpacing technology innovations in
resources and energy, it may well be that no solution is humane under any
economic system --- ---
http://snipurl.com/9wu3
Malthus will probably be correct about our future ---
http://et.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus

Question
What are the main causes of poverty in Africa?
Why might Africa’s systemic problems never be changed?Hint: These causes must be solved before education has a chance. But
education doesn't have a chance until these underlying problems are solved.
So Africa faces an enormous paradox.

Answer --- Corruption and a vast supply of
AK-47sThe scandals are as regular as Africa’s tropical
rains. In one season an opposition party, or younger African politician,
vows to clean up government and root out the graft that helps to keep the
continent poor. In the next, the once-untarnished leader is exposed for
theft and rotten dealings of his own.…
"Fighting corruption in Africa," The Economist, February 3, 2006 ---
http://www.economist.com/agenda/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_VQRSDJG

Three Danish cartoons made three political pointsOne showed Muhammad turning away suicide
bombers from the gates of heaven, saying "Stop, stop — we ran out of
virgins!" — which I believe was a commentary on Muslims' predilection for
violence. Another was a cartoon of Muhammad with horns, which I believe was
a commentary on Muslims' predilection for violence. The third showed
Muhammad with a turban in the shape of a bomb, which I believe was an
expression of post-industrial ennui in a secular — oops, no, wait: It was
more of a commentary on Muslims' predilection for violence. In order to
express their displeasure with the idea that Muslims are violent, thousands
of Muslims around the world engaged in rioting, arson, mob savagery,
flag-burning, murder and mayhem, among other peaceful acts of nonviolence.
Muslims are the only people who make feminists seem laid-back.
Ann Coulter, "CALVIN AND HOBBES — AND MUHAMMAD," Ann Coulter's Home Page,
February 8, 2006 ---
http://www.anncoulter.com/cgi-local/welcome.cgi

A Cartoon Flap in the United States
Now The Washington Post has the Joint Chiefs of Staff Upset (Their protest
letter is indeed a rare event)A Tom Toles editorial cartoon published in The
Washington Post on Monday and on its Web site has drawn a very rare and very
strong protest letter to the editors from all six members of The Joint
Chiefs of Staff," reports the trade magazine Editor & Publisher.Joe Strupp, Dave Astor and Greg Mitchell. "UPDATE:
'Wash Post' Defends Toles Cartoon That Drew Angry Protest Letter from Joint
Chiefs Photo by Julia Ewan/The Washington Post Tom Toles' editorial cartoon
runs in about 200 newspapers," Editor & Publisher, February 1, 2006
---
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001955937

The letter, written on Tuesday,
charges that the six military leaders "believe you and Mr. Toles have
done a disservice to your readers and your paper's reputation by using
such a callous depiction of those who have volunteered to defend this
nation, and as a result, have suffered traumatic and life-altering
wounds. ... As the Joint Chiefs, it is rare that we all put our hand to
one letter, but we cannot let this reprehensible cartoon go unanswered."

Big (Like in Obese) Problems at Southwest Airlines

"Passenger said encounter with Southwest left her
feeling agitated and scared," by Kathy McCormack, Manchester Union Leader,
February 9, 2006 ---
http://snipurl.com/MULfeb9

When she got on the plane,
Thompson noticed that most of the seats were taken. She took an aisle
seat in the back, buckling her seatbelt and putting down the armrest. An
employee, a man, came on the plane and asked her to meet him on the
jetway. She did so, thinking that either Southwest had a better flight
for her or there was some emergency involving her family. Instead, she
testified, she was told she needed to buy a second seat for her comfort
and safety.

That’s when Thompson,
a successful cosmetics company CEO from
Exeter who filed a racial discrimination
lawsuit against Southwest, started to feel
uncomfortable.

She said she asked
the man several times to explain why she
needed to buy the second seat; he kept
saying it was for her comfort and safety.
She told the worker she was going to return
to her seat and do nothing unless he could
give her a reason to buy a second one.

As she headed back
in, she recalled hearing about a Southwest
policy applying to obese passengers. “I
thought, ‘There’s no way they could be
talking about me,’” Thompson testified about
the June 2003 incident. A frequent flier on
Southwest, she had never been approached
about buying a second seat.

Thompson, who
according to court records is 5-foot-8 and
weighed between 300 and 330 pounds at the
time, was approached by the worker again. He
said, “‘If you get off the flight right now,
I’ll refund you your ticket,’” she
testified.

“I was kind of
startled,” she said. “‘Why are you harassing
me like this?’” The man didn’t say anything
and walked off the plane, she said.

By now, Thompson
said, she was feeling agitated and scared.
“It was clear to me that this wasn’t over.
Something else was going to happen.”

She felt that she
shouldn’t stay on the plane and that
Southwest didn’t want her there. “God’s
telling me to go home. Something’s wrong
here,” she recalled.

When she walked
off, she saw the man and several other
Southwest workers, along with two armed
sheriff’s deputies, right outside the plane.
They were talking about her.

“What have I done?”
she asked. One of the workers said she had
been told to buy the extra ticket. A deputy
said that the sheriff’s department, which
handles security for the airport, is called
by airlines to assist with removing
passengers from planes.

When Thompson kept
demanding an explanation, asking if she was
being targeted because she’s black, a woman
or fat, another worker started telling her
to keep her voice down, she testified. This
worker behaved like a bully, very
confrontational and aggressive, Thompson
said, and she decided to stand up to him,
admitting that she used profanity.

She asked the
workers for their names; the one she had
been arguing with said they didn’t have to
give names. “I said, ‘Only racist cowards
don’t give me their names,’” Thompson
testified. “‘You might as well have a sheet
over your head.’”

Eventually, she
went back to the Southwest counter and was
given a refund. The deputies were with her;
she eventually started to weep and one
assisted her, helping her get on a United
Airlines flight. She was charged for one
seat.

Thompson said she
later called Southwest’s corporate office in
Texas. A customer service representative
apologized for what happened, said the
employees didn’t follow procedures and
offered her $350 in gift certificates.

The incident left
her humiliated, Thompson said, and she has
been seeing a psychologist to deal with her
feelings.

On
cross-examination, Garry Lane, a lawyer
representing Southwest, recalled a
deposition from Thompson saying she didn’t
pay much attention to the male co-worker as
she was getting her new flight arrangements.
When asked why she didn’t describe his look
of contempt at the time, Thompson said she
wasn’t asked about it.

Southwest’s policy
states that a “customer of size” is someone
who can’t sit in a seat without having the
armrest raised and is sitting on part of the
adjacent seat. In his opening statement,
Lane said Southwest employees will testify
that they saw the armrest up most of the
time and that Thompson was sitting on part
of the vacant seat next to her.

AnswerThis is what passes for an extreme makeover in
Washington: A summer intern for seven-term Rep. Martin T. Meehan (D-Mass.)
altered the congressman's profile on the Wikipedia Web site to remove an old
promise that he would limit his service to four terms. Someone doctored Sen.
Robert C. Byrd's (D-W.Va.) profile on the site to list his age as 180. (He
is 88.) An erroneous entry for Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) claimed that he
"was voted the most annoying senator by his peers in Congress." Last week,
Wikipedia temporarily blocked certain Capitol Hill Web addresses from
altering any entries in the otherwise wide-open forum. Wikipedia is a vast,
growing information database written and maintained solely by volunteers. In
December, the database received 4.7 million edits from viewers, of which a
relatively small number -- "a couple of thousand," according to founder
Jimmy Wales -- constituted vandalism.
Yuki Noguchi, "On Capitol Hill, Playing WikiPolitics Partisanship Tests Web
Site's Policies," The Washington Post, February 4, 2006 ---
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/03/AR2006020302610.html

Answer --- An Assortment of Health Care Majors (from physical therapy to
nursing to administration)"It's the fastest-growing major that this
campus has ever seen," said William E. Cullinan, associate chairman of the
department of biomedical sciences at Marquette, in Milwaukee. "It just
exploded beyond anyone's imagination." Flagship state universities, and
private institutions other than the elite, have long drawn large numbers of
working- and middle-class students with a pragmatic bent. But university
officials say the current generation is particularly attuned to selecting
majors with strong career possibilities.
Alan Finder, "A Hot Trend on Campus: Majoring in Health Care," The New York
Times, February 5, 2006 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/education/05career.html

Question
What do CFOs think accounting undergraduate and masters programs are doing
better than ever before?

Answer"Colleges and universities are responding to a
changing accounting landscape," said Max Messmer, chairman of Accountemps.
"More courses are being offered in areas such as internal audit, enterprise
risk management, forensic accounting, information technology and business
ethics." The appeal of an accounting career is growing, perhaps as a result
of increased emphasis on the profession. According to the American Institute
of Certified Public Accountants, enrollment in accounting programs climbed
19 percent from 2000 to 2004, following declines during the late 1990s.
There also was a 17 percent increase in the number of new accounting
graduates hired by organizations between 2003 and 2004.
"Accounting Grads Better Prepared, Survey Says," AccountingWeb,
January 31, 2006 ---
http://accounting.smartpros.com/x51625.xml

AnswerIn the worldwide suckers' market, gamblers are
the only people who are slower to learn than young adults with master's
degrees. Bright graduate students possess a pair of nonmarketable skills:
the ability to write term papers and the ability to take academic exams.
They are also economic illiterates and incurably naïve.... Those few Ph.D.'s
who receive a full-time position at a university find that they are paid
much less than tenured members of the department. They are assigned the
lower-division classes, which are large. ... Those untenured faculty members
who perform well in megaclasses are kept on until the day of reckoning: the
decision to grant them tenure, usually eight years after they go on the
payroll. They are usually not rehired unless they have published narrowly
focused articles in professional journals. But megaclass professors do not
have much time to do the required research. The assistant professor is now
35 years old or older. He has not made the cut. He is now relegated to the
academic underworld: the community colleges....
Gary North, "In Academia, Big Brains, Empty Pockets," The New York Times,
February 5, 2006 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/weekinreview/05read.html

The public grows increasingly skeptical of the nature and purposes of
liberal arts educationWhile the public grows increasingly skeptical of
the nature and purposes of liberal arts education, academics generally, and
we suspect English scholars particularly, have not been as effective as they
could, should, and must be when representing the value of their work,
especially teaching. In a colloquial nutshell, public criticism tends to
follow some version of this reasoning: English departments aren’t teaching
my kids to write and read well enough because they’re too busy trying to
turn them into Marxists, feminists, homosexuals, or — worse — grad students.
Meanwhile, our scholarship is derided as obtuse, cryptic, or absurd. It
matters little that such descriptions are inaccurate, unfair, and often
advanced in service of narrow-minded ideologies at odds with the democratic
underpinnings of a liberal arts education. The fact remains that our work is
nevertheless perceived at turns as irrelevant or threatening, a fact which
directly and indirectly contributes to the deplorable state of labor
conditions in English.
Frank P. Gaughan and Peter H. Khost, "Reading, Writing and Representing,"
Inside Higher Ed, February 6, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/02/06/gaughan

While critics such as Sirc and
Menand are clearly influential here, we understand this
task to be of particular importance to graduate
students, not least of all because the future of work in
the humanities is quite literally in our hands. Should
we continue the tradition of predominantly insular
and/or antagonistic discourse, our degree of leverage
and relevance with the public will continue to decrease,
as will our prospects for tenure-line work. It is
incumbent upon us to open the lines of communication and
to make known the good work that is already being done
in our classrooms.

Scholarship on this issue is already underway. For
example, at the 2005 MLA conference, Michael Bérubé and
Cary Nelson spoke to issues of contingent labor; others
such as Peter Mortensen and David Shumway attended to
matters of representation. We regard these two issues as
linked; that is, the better we understand and represent
our work (especially teaching), the better our working
conditions stand a chance of improving. For this, we
conclude with the following proposals that take from and
build on the work of these and other scholars:

1. Cultivate existing trends
toward interdisciplinarity, such as linked or clustered
courses, in ways that effectively demonstrate the value
of English studies, particularly in terms of
accomplished reading and writing.

2. Realize that the Ph.D., as a
credential for teaching, requires civic responsibility
and ethical action. The better we collectively attend to
this fact and make this work known, the better we will
be able to build a platform from which to argue for
improved working conditions.

3. Accept and embrace the
possibility of working through cultural debates in ways
and venues that are accessible to the general public.
This is not to suggest necessary agreement with the
public, but to encourage a variety of discourse that
holds the public in vital partnership.

4. Encourage hiring, promotion,
and tenure committees to value the above efforts or else
they simply will not happen, or at least not to the
extent that they should. In other words, in order to
improve the representation of our work, it will be
necessary to appeal effectively not only to the public
but also to our senior colleagues.

For decades, the ultrarich looking for discreet
banking services gravitated to Switzerland, where account secrecy was
sacrosanct. But when Swiss authorities acceded to pressure from the
European Union to discourage tax evasion, the door opened for a new
challenger to woo the world's wealthy: Singapore.

The tiny Asian nation has beefed up account
secrecy protections, has changed trust laws and has begun allowing
foreigners who meet minimum wealth requirements to purchase land and
become residents.

Now private-banking money is flooding in from
at least three sources: Asians who have grown rich from the booming
Asia-Pacific economy, foreigners seeking to invest and do business in
Asia, and Europeans moving money from Switzerland for tax purposes.
Swiss banks are expanding in Singapore to get in on the action.

The money flow demonstrates how one nation, in
the borderless world of international banking, can use banking
regulation as an economic development tool -- and how complicated it is
for tax authorities around the world to plug revenue leaks.

"While tax authorities have increased
surveillance and regulation in a bid to stem the flow of investment
capital and profits to low-tax jurisdictions, it's easier to shift money
around than it used to be thanks to technology," says Chris Edwards,
director of tax policy at Cato Institute, a Washington think tank that
favors free trade. "Both legal avoidance and illegal evasion techniques
have become more accessible."

I can’t help commenting on your tidbit on
Flint. I grew up in Flint. Flint now has the reputation as the city with
the largest PERCENTAGE of abandon houses (Detroit has the largest NUMBER
of abandon houses).

In the early 1970’s, of my friends in a “car
club” (a euphemism for an informal high school group of illegal street
racers), I was the only one who went off to college. The rest walked
into various GM plants in Flint and immediately got jobs.

When they told stories of working in the
“plants” you knew GM was heading for problems. One of my favorite
stories was my friend Henry. He operated a large press that punched out
the grill and headlight rims for Chevrolet trucks from a large roll of
aluminum. He was not allowed by union rule to make more than 75 per
hour. If everything worked well, he could create the 75 in 45 minutes.
So, he would then have to stop for 15 minutes. He got very good at
taking 15-minute naps. Then he would start the next hour. What if he did
not make the 75 in the hour? Well, it was never his fault. The press
would jam. The aluminum would run out. He was not allowed to make up the
short fall in the remaining part of the day. He could only make up the
short fall in overtime. Bottom line, GM had no motivation to increase
productivity. If Henry could make 75 grills in 30 minutes then he would
have to take 30-minute naps—no savings for GM.

Another friend, Gary, worked in the Chevrolet
engine factory. After a complete engine was manufactured, it was
enclosed in a large wooden crate and the crate was moved to a warehouse.
The first day on the job, the foreman was giving Gary a tour. As they
walked through the warehouse, the foreman pointed out certain crates to
Gary and said that those crates were empty—but they were turned such
that the opening was on the back-side of the crate, so it wasn’t obvious
as you walked through the warehouse. The FOREMAN said that the guys used
the empty boxes to take naps during the work day. Some of the boxes
actually had blankets in them—for a more comfortable nap!

Everybody knew in those days that you did not
want to buy a car the manufactured on Mondays or Fridays, or anytime
during hunting season. There was no telling what parts may be missing or
mis-installed on those days.

What is becoming a serious problem for publishers who cease publishing
particular textbooks is finding that the authors are either making those
textbooks free online or priced at a small fraction of the price of what the
publishing companies are now offering.

The Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 is, strictly
speaking, a deficit-reduction act only in the Washington sense of the
term—meaning, it is part of a plan to increase the deficit. It consists
of about $40 billion of reductions in spending on entitlement programs,
spread over five years (fiscal 2006 through 2010). Based on
Congressional Budget Office forecasts, the Deficit Reduction Act will
reduce entitlement outlays by about 0.5 percent over that period and cut
cumulated deficits by about 2.5 percent. Wow.

Meanwhile, another budget bill is slated to cut
taxes by $70 billion over the same five-year period. The net effect of
the two bills (known as reconciliation bills) would be to increase the
deficit by $30 billion. "The fact that the overall effect of
reconciliation taken together was to enlarge rather than reduce the
deficit undermines the credibility of anyone claiming that this was a
deficit-reduction package," says Maya MacGuineas, the president of the
Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan
fiscal-watchdog group.

Judged in purely fiscal terms, then, the
reconciliation action resembles the old joke about a man who fell out of
a plane without a parachute. Fortunately, there was a haystack below
him. Unfortunately, there was a pitchfork in the haystack. Fortunately,
he missed the pitchfork. Unfortunately, he missed the haystack.

The reconciliation bill focuses on entitlement
programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and student loans. Not to be
overlooked are the discretionary accounts. Here, the Republicans' budget
is indeed tight.

The White House boasts that, thanks in part to
a 1 percent across-the-board reduction, total discretionary spending
(that is, defense and homeland security, plus domestic discretionary
programs) will grow by only 1.1 percent in fiscal 2006, which is below
the likely rate of inflation. G. William Hoagland, the director of
budget and appropriations for Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.)
notes that domestic discretionary spending (which excludes defense and
homeland security) is budgeted to decline a little, a feat not seen in
Washington for years.

But, again, the Republicans missed the
haystack. Domestic discretionary spending accounts for only a sixth of
the budget, and the other five-sixths are growing. According to the
Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, Congress reduced nondefense
discretionary spending by $106 billion over five years, but it more than
offset those cuts with $237 billion in added spending on defense, Iraq,
and emergencies like Katrina and bird flu.

All of that is before counting billions more in
likely supplemental appropriations, notably for the Iraq war, which is
being conducted off the books. "Appropriations represented some success
this year, in that the line was held on nondefense discretionary
spending," says Brian Riedl, a senior budget analyst at the Heritage
Foundation. "At the same time, Congress continues to put $100 billion to
$150 billion a year into emergency supplemental bills, and those never
get counted in the final number."

If your paramount concern is reducing the
federal deficit, then the best that can be said for the 2006 budget is
that it may do less fiscal damage than the budgets of 2005, 2004, 2003,
2002, and 2001. But, as has become pretty obvious, deficit reduction is
not the paramount concern of today's conservative Republicans. Their
concern, rather, is to scrape away at the calcified mass of programs
that constitute Big Government. On that measure, how did they do?

Not particularly well. Riedl says, "I didn't
find much in the reconciliation bill that will have a substantial impact
on the budget or on the programs themselves." Many of the reductions
involved fee increases, spectrum-auction proceeds, and other measures
short of fundamental programmatic reform.

Companies pay higher salaries to graduates of
the most prominent business schools, even when they believe that
lesser-known schools offer better educations, according to a study
described in the December/January issue of the Academy of Management
Journal.

The study, conducted by researchers at the
University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business, found that
those two variables do not always go hand in hand. In their analysis of
data from a poll of 1,600 professional recruiters, the researchers found
that the business schools considered to be the most prominent didn't
always get top marks for quality.

The biggest bucks went to graduates of
high-profile schools -- the kind that top the charts in national
magazine ratings or have faculty members with lofty pedigrees. A report
on the study does not give the names of any of the schools mentioned by
the recruiters.

"There's an old cliché that nobody got fired
for buying from IBM," said Violina P. Rindova, an assistant professor of
strategy at the Maryland business school and one of the study's authors.
"There's a certain reassurance that if you recruit someone from a
prominent school, the boss won't be upset and that you'll have a
stronger guarantee."

Science fiction that might become reality
Could Terrorists Hijack Your Brain?Security experts need to prepare for a much broader
spectrum of potential bioterror agents, according to a report released this
week by the Washington, DC-based National Academies. Most bioweapons
research has focused on traditional biological agents, such as anthrax and
smallpox. But that focus is dangerously narrow, the report says; emerging
technologies in biotechnology and the life sciences could be hijacked to
take control of genes, immune systems, and even brains. "The threat is
extremely broad, and it is increasingly global," says Stanley M. Lemon,
cochair of the advisory committee and director of the Institute for Human
Infections and Immunity at the University of Texas Medical Branch in
Galveston, TX.
Emilsy Singer, "Could Terrorists Hijack Your Brain? According to a new
report on biosecurity, technological advances in the not-so-distant future
may make it a possibility," MIT's Technology Review, February 1, 2006
---
http://www.technologyreview.com/BioTech/wtr_16221,306,p1.html

Mark Twain vs. Tom Sawyer: The bold deconstruction of a national
iconIt’s hard to read Ron Powers’ engaging new Mark
Twain: A Life (Free Press) and not conclude that there’s a congenital defect
in the very heart of American literature. Powers, a Pulitzer Prize winner
for Flags of Our Fathers, argues that the man born Samuel Clemens
“democratized the national voice by availing it of vernacular; rough action
that sprawled over waterway and open terrain; comedy political
consciousness, and skepticism toward the very idea of lofty instruction.”
Nick Gillespie, "Mark Twain vs. Tom Sawyer: The bold deconstruction of
a national icon," Reason Magazine, February 2006 ---
http://www.reason.com/0602/cr.ng.mark.shtml

Scandal and Sex Journalism
"Wonking Off : Ana Marie Cox dishes about scandal, sex, journalism, and
leaving her popular blog for the literary life. A Reason interview.," by
Kerry Howley, Reason Magazine, January 6, 2006 ---
http://www.reason.com/links/links010606.shtml

You sea shore cottage won't float off in your lifetime:
Scientists play down rising seas Researchers say melting glaciers and ice caps
will cause just a 0.1m rise in global sea levels by 2100 – less than half
the increase of several earlier predictions. But they show that melting of
glacial and mountain areas is accelerating fast leading to flooding and land
slides in mountainous regions such as Nepal. Dr Sarah Raper, a climatologist
from Manchester Metropolitan University’s Centre for Aviation Transport and
the Environment, said: “Our research predicts a relatively low sea-level
rise from glaciers and icecaps, compared with earlier work, but the local
effect of accelerated glacier melt is going to be very important and may
already be increasing catastrophic damage in the form of glacier lake
outbursts in high mountain regions.”
"Scientists play down rising seas: Manchester scientists studying
global warming are predicting a much lower rise in sea levels than
previously feared," Innovations Report, January 20, 2006 ---
http://www.innovations-report.de/html/berichte/geowissenschaften/bericht-54122.html

What's the point of going to school if you can't be around girls?Today there are more than 160 co-ed public
schools around the country with a single-gender option--up from 27 four
years ago, Sax's group estimates. (No federal statistics exist.) At
716-student Woodward, parents have enrolled 162 children in single-gender
classes for core subjects on a voluntary basis. Boys and girls still have
ample time to mix--at lunch, gym and in arts classes. Required to meet the
same standards, the classes offer a study in contrasts. When Roberts
recently taught a history lesson on the Alamo, the boys "got out of their
chairs and pretended to shoot an imaginary enemy." In Stomberg's girls'
class, a lesson on the Holocaust consisted of reading about a Jewish girl
during the war and talking about "how they would feel if it happened to
them." . . . Only time, test scores and experience will tell whether the
single-gender class is here to stay or just a passing educational fad.
Roncalli counselor Michael Horton says the approach elicited criticism--from
none other than his son Nick, 19, who, Horton recalls, pointedly asked,
"What's the point of going to school if you can't be around girls?"
"Should Boys and Girls Be Taught Separately?" People Magazine,
January 30, 2006, pp. 83-84.

Walt Mossberg tests a $5,000 exercise bikeUnlike the typical exercise bike, the Spark has
movable handlebars to steer you through the three-dimensional virtual trails
on its screen, and a gearshift for tackling the many hills you encounter.
When you climb a hill on the screen, the pedaling really feels like you're
climbing a hill.
"Test-Riding a $5,000 Indoor Bike: Web-Linked Exercise Cycle On 3-D Trails
Isn't Boring, But Don't Expect to Coast," Walter S. Mossberg, The Wall
Street Journal, February 1, 2006; Page D11

Sigh!A revolutionary technology that could standardize
the way corporate results are reported and speed up trading decisions is
facing a big problem -- few people are interested. The technology, known as
XBRL or Extensible Business Reporting Language, has been around for about
eight years and is touted as a development as important for financial
reporting as the bar code was for retail pricing. It works by labeling
financial information with computer-readable tags so regulators, investors,
managers and other stakeholders can make apples-to-apples comparisons in
financial statements. XBRL has the support of about 400 organizations,
including some of the biggest players on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley,
as well as a ringing endorsement from U.S. Securities and Exchange
Commission chairman Christopher Cox.But despite five years of marketing, few
companies are using the technology and investors are not exactly clamoring
for it. Only about 200 people showed up at an XBRL convention this week in
San Jose, where it was clear much of the investment community and corporate
America are giving the technology the cold shoulder.
Emily Chasen, "Lifting the Lid: New accounting technology gets cold
shoulder," Yahoo News, January 20, 2006 ---
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060121/tc_nm/column_lifting_dc
Bob Jensen's threads on XBRL are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/XBRLandOLAP.htm

Time Warp? Surgery performed on baby aged -.0356 years oldPerforming a procedure that had never been done
anywhere in the world, doctors sliced a hole in Grace's grape-sized heart
and propped it open with a stint. Then, 13 days later she was born
naturally. Opinion Journal, February 1, 2006
Also see
http://www.wired.com/news/wireservice/0,70125-0.html?tw=wn_index_9

Know Your Enemy Better Than You Know Your FriendsAmerican troops in Iraq are seeing increasing
evidence of professional training being provided to the terrorists and
anti-government forces they face. Some ambushes are carried out with
precision and planning that is very uncharacteristic of the Iraqis, even the
elite professional troops that used to serve Saddam. Enemy snipers are
becoming more effective, by using discipline and professional techniques . .
. What has been going on is small scale training programs, and more
selectivity in which men the terrorists allow to participate in combat
operations. Most of these attacks are driven by money (along with
ideological, nationalistic and religious reasons). The fighters are paid,
and the paymasters are demanding more for their money. The number of attacks
is down, and more of the attackers are getting killed or captured. But there
is a growing hard core of very skillful men, who, by having survived so many
battles, paid attention to what worked, and have become much more lethal.
"The Enemy Professionals in Iraq," Strategy Page, January 20, 2006 ---
http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htinf/articles/20060120.aspx

Of course Congress
does not want to limit the amount of drinking at lunch
The Wall Street Journal Flashback, January 27, 1978

President Carter's plan to end the "three martini" business
lunch isn't going down well in Congress. Al Ullman (D.,
Ore.) already has called the idea "too controversial" for
Congress to tackle in this election year. Mr. Carter wants
to limit the deduction to 50%.

Fear not! There is a new scheme that offers even
greater recognition. The idea is to move into a tent, sell the house and
buy a peerage. When Lloyd George was caught
selling peerages, there was a great scandal.
Now all the parties are at it. Of course, there are those who think it
is a disgrace to a once great nation that membership of the upper house
can be bought for the price of a modest dwelling, but it is a tribute to
the achievements of one Great Leader that he can not only change the
moral climate in a few short years, but he also makes such a facility
available at such a modest cost.

The way
the scheme works is that you make your donation to one of the three main
parties. You also have to give a small amount to charity, as that is the
best official excuse for the award. You get the money back from the
taxpayer over the years in attendance allowances at the House. The
beauty of this scheme is that taxpayers’ money is transferred to the
party machines without the mechanism being obvious. It is better than
that, though, because you also become qualified for various City
directorships, which require very little effort for a substantial screw.

There is
one remaining problem for those of us that suffer from the Hamlet
syndrome (the inability to make up one’s mind). With three
indistinguishable parties available (not to mention the Official Green
Party) how is one to choose?

Survey: Unrealistic Business Goals, Deadlines Cause Unethical Behavior
Pressure from management or the Board to meet
unrealistic business objectives and deadlines is the leading factor most
likely to cause unethical corporate behavior, according to a new survey on
business ethics. SmartPros, January 18, 2006 ---
http://accounting.smartpros.com/x51403.xml

In this case generic drugs are saferA widely used heart-surgery medicine that is
standard treatment in many hospitals has been found to carry serious health
risks, according to a new study. The drug, Trasylol from Bayer AG, of
Germany, is used to stem blood loss in patients undergoing heart-bypass
surgery. Approved in the U.S. in 1993, the drug is given to about a quarter
of the one million people world-wide who undergo bypass surgery each year,
the study's author estimates.
David Armstrong, "Serious Risks Are Found in Heart Drug: Widely Used
Medicine Increases Chance of Kidney Failure, Stroke; Generics Are as
Effective and Safer," The Wall Street Journal, January 26, 2006; Page
D1 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB113824252116356643.html?mod=todays_us_personal_journal

Websites promoting anorexia and bulimia continue to proliferate. In a Q&A, physician Rebecka Peebles, an instructor
in adolescent medicine, and third-year medical student Jenny Wilson, '01,
describe the phenomenon and what it means for people fighting eating
disorders.
"Is It Healthy When Anorexics Network?" Stanford Magazine, January
2006 ---
http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2006/janfeb/farm/news/ana.html

Stanford:
What do you find on pro-eating disorder websites?

Wilson:
They give tips and techniques on how to purge better, or how to hide it
from your parents. They also have “thinspirations,” which are images of
anorexic women. And a lot of them have message boards. We found that
two-thirds [of patients] learned about new weight-loss and purging
techniques from the websites, and one-third learned about diet pills,
laxatives and supplements. So there is an indication that they are
learning about unhealthy behaviors that are impacting their health.

A Remedial High School Alternative

PLATO Learning Inc. (
http://www.plato.com ) has announced the release of PLATO Courses, which
are semester-long online courses that provide schools and districts a way to
deliver rigorous credit-recovery solutions, alternatives for students not
succeeding in the traditional environment, credit-granting distance learning
programs, and home school curricula. The PLATO Courses cover math, science,
and social studies, and are aligned to national standards in each subject
area. Each course provides a comprehensive course curriculum, including
exemptive assessments, instructional content, cumulative final exams, and
state standards coverage reports. To promote the successful use of PLATO
Courses, PLATO Education Consultants provide both on-site and electronic
professional development sessions. Each PLATO Course also includes teacher
support materials in the form of a Teacher's Guide and an Implementation
Guide. Pricing varies.

While in a
paranoid mood, one of the worst things about sticking your neck out in
various fields of controversy is being attacked for something you did
not say. Number Watch receives periodic hits from a Wikipedia
article onThe Greenhouse
Effectclaiming that theNumber
Watch account of the same subject gives
support to the erroneous idea that the glasshouse is heated solely by
inhibition of radiation. It quite specifically does not do this (If in
doubt look for the words major and so-called). Glass was
introduced in the first paragraph simply to explain the misnomer. In
retrospect this was a mistake, as many people jump to conclusions and
never get past the first two paragraphs. They are like the old time
drama critic who always watched the first act, then retired to the bar
to write his critique and get drunk. It does not help to rewrite to
clarify the meaning, because you then come under attack for covertly
backing down,

Some seem
to claim that the inhibition of convection is the whole story in the
glasshouse. This oversimplification derives from an experiment by R W
Wood in 1929. He took two black boxes, one with a glass lid and the
other with a quartz one (which is transparent to the whole spectrum) and
showed that there was little difference in the heating effect.

If you
take two parallel plates (with area much larger than the separation) and
a fluid between them, then gradually raise the temperature of the lower
one, at first there is no convection, merely conduction. Then at a
critical temperature determined by the physical constants of the fluid,
convection starts in the form of cellular motion and the cell size is
determined by the geometry and the said constants. The motion is always
such as to maximise the heat flow. The critical condition can be
theoretically determined with some accuracy by perturbing the linearised
Navier Stokes Equations. A cardboard box has much more restrictive
boundary conditions and probably inhibits convection more effectively. A
glasshouse presents even more complicated boundary conditions, so the
flow will be chaotic, though it will still be such as to maximise the
heat transfer. Nevertheless, the selective re-radiation effect must
occur, though, as stated in the Number Watch article, it will not be the
major component.

Other
comments were made following the last such attacklast August. Incidentally, the
Wikipedia article contains a nice example of what we might call
Tablemanship. By tabulating the amount left after the previous entry
they make the bottom numbers look enormous to the innumerate, when they
are, in fact,
very small. Nice one!

Social Computing Facts and FiguresSocial-computing tools and mobile
technologies are becoming more important for colleges,
according to
a reportissued Tuesday by the
New Media Consortium and Educause. The report — an annual
look at technology and higher education — also suggests that
colleges not assume technological literacy, even by the
generation of students arriving on campuses now.Inside Higher Education, February 1, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/02/01/qt
Zee
http://www.nmc.org/pdf/2006_Horizon_Report.pdf